Max Daniels is a twenty-one year old writer and author of The Manipulantwhich is available on Amazon UK and US. He is currently in the process of completing his second novel entitled The Follies of Being.

It’s easy to forget that modern ways of entertainment were initially met with a degree of scepticism. Radio, film and television were viewed with scorn instead of a new format for artistic expression. Now, with fantastic films like The Grand Budapest Hotel and amazing TV shows such as Game of Thrones, the idea that cinema and TV can provide a plot equal to any good book is not a shocking thought. Today we are met with another source of entertainment that is still viewed as something crass and without artistic merit. I am referring to the format of video games. In many ways the video game industry is viewed as either a simple distraction like the classic Space Invaders, or a controversial source for debate like the Grand Theft Auto franchise. This is not always the case. Something like Telltale’s The Walking Dead games are a gripping narrative that forces the player to decide major events that craft the rest of the plot. Whatever you do – good, bad or the very common grey – will forever change the story and the characters you interact with. When I first played the game I was on the verge of tears by the final episode and felt a supreme loss similar to when finishing a fantastic novel.

The modern gaming industry is producing works of art that grab you with their emotive narrative. On some occasions, these are immediately seen in the advertisements. The Assassin’s Creed franchise has produce several adverts that instil a mixture of excitement, tension and importance. The music and dramatic scenes capture everything the series stands for and draws many consumers in. In short, they are like miniature movies. Indeed, some games such as Dead Island produced an astounding trailer that was not representative of the gameplay. In this case, the plot of the trailer was better than the plot of the game.Video games are able to create these intense feelings partly due to the levels of interaction the player has. We are in the story and even when the plot is linear, our own personal approach provides a level of immersion that films and TV cannot. Oddly, the video game has more in common with the novel because of this interaction. When we read a book we have no pictures, no visual guide to tell us what things are. We place ourselves in the story. We interact with the text and make it real. In a different way, the video game visualises the environment for us, but places the ‘reader’ in control of the narrative. In the most extreme cases we have direct ownership on who we are and how the plot changes: like in the Mass Effect games. In lesser ways we are placed behind the eyes of the protagonist and are forced to live through their hardships and adventures such as in the superb Bioshock games.

I suppose by this point you are questioning why a post about video games is on a publishers website. It is easy for lovers of literature to see the changing face of the entertainment industry ruining the modern writer. With video games slowly garnering respect this can make us feel the author of today will struggle to get their story out there. We should not see it this way. The Interactive Narrative of video games provides a brand new format for writers to express themselves. It should be taken advantage of before the industry is flooded with hundreds of quality stories. If you go back far enough, even the novel was once considered an unartistic way of writing. Like with cinema and television, the Interactive Narrative will be critiqued like a good book. It’s time to ignore the snobbish attitude towards video games and time to respect the industry for the potential that it has in creating tales that will make us laugh, cry and contemplate.

In my line of work as managing editor of Dark Moon Digest, I am often asked what my favorite type of monster is. Am I a vampire girl or a zombie girl? Do I prefer werewolves, ghosts? What’s most likely to scare me? To be quite bluntly honest, not much scares me in terms of storytelling anymore. I have read so many stories, that I am almost immune to it.Zombies have never held any appeal to me. Their slow shambling manner and lack of intelligence has never scared me at all. The people of Walmart that walk zombie-like through the store are scarier than any zombie story. That’s not to say that I just reject every zombie story I get. I have published a share of them, but the story has to be really well-written and has to be different.Vampires can be done correctly. They have a certain flair that borders on the erotic. Right after the Twilight explosion, there was a rush of vampire stories. But that trend is slowing down. Vampires to me are not scary. Sensual, most of the time, but scary, no. Again, a well-written vampire story will make it into the short list pile. I don’t get enough werewolf and ghost stories. Werewolves aren’t scary to me, but they pose a bit more mystique than the vampire. For one, werewolves can’t control their thirst or their transformation. They are human beings most of the time. For another, they aren’t overshadowed by the eroticism that overlays most vampires. They are simply animals acting on animal urges when the moon is right. Ghosts are about the only supernatural creation that scares me. It’s the fear of the unknown. Do we know that ghosts exist, or is it simply a figment of our imagination? Plus ghosts (if we choose to believe in their existence) are not physical entities. You can’t stab them in the heart or shoot their brains in order to stop them. There is no way to stop them. So, what monster is the scariest? The answer is simple: human beings. There is nothing scarier than a human being. A human who has lost control of their common sense is scarier than any zombie. Why? Simple. Humans do exist. My next door neighbor could be a serial killer. The guy I accidentally ran into at the grocery store could be a stalker with torture tendencies. The woman I waved to could be cannibalistic. Humans like to pretend that we are civilized, but the simple fact is, underneath the thin veneer, we are scarier than any other animal, supernatural or otherwise. We have the same animal instincts, but out intellect for technology far exceeds our common sense. Our fragile brains can flip at any given moment, leaving us in some sort of psychotic void. So, the monster that scares me the most is you.

Kayvee Tiaren is the author of Macabrarium, a psychological thriller published in early 2014. Her novel can be found on Amazon US and Amazon UK.

A lot of people came up to me after my novel, Macabrarium, came out. Amongst the stream of “How did you find the time?” (“I made time.”) and the “Where did you find this idea from?” (“In my head.”), there was one question that stuck out: “You’re a female. How can you even write like a male?” My novel’s main character was a male named Chris. The question came off without any upwards inflections, actually. It just sounded like a statement; there was no question about it. I, as a female, could not possibly encapsulate the intricacies of the male mind. And to be fair, there was no way that I ever could fully understand life as a male, but try I did. Here’s five ways a girl tried to write like she was a male:1.Do field work. Go talk to your brother. Realize that perhaps he mumbles far too much for you to write “Then Chris mumbled” in your manuscript. So you seek out your father and learn that he thinks you don’t have enough time or ideas to even write a novel in the first place. 2.Watch “Mulan” and “Mrs. Doubtfire” repeatedly.Pick up on some nuances between behaving as a male and behaving as a female. Try to translate the visual and auditory effects into writing while you stroke your beard.3. Change absolutely nothing about how you would write the character.I can’t fully understand life as a male. But there was one thing I did understand: my main character, Chris. I know that Chris’s internal vocabulary primarily consists of opprobrious and offensive terms. I know that Chris can afford only cheap beer and those he cares about are far and few, and he would rather keep it that way. If Chris was a llama, you can bet that I would be touting all about the benefits of pastures full of fresh grass.Honestly, there is no secret. It’s not about writing in certain terms of a “he” or a “she.” It’s about writing as your character.

Tom Knoblauch is the author of My Rotting Body and the soon-to-be-published Influenza, Nebraska. You can find My Rotting Body on Amazon US and Amazon UK.

Yeesh. Why is writing a blog post so much harder than writing a novel? Why does the structure hide and why can’t I have 5 pages of dialogue?My novels My Rotting Body and the soon-to-be-published Influenza, Nebraska are psychological thrillers. I try to distance myself as the author from them so I don’t influence any interpretation of the events. In that same sense, I’ve avoided writing about my works in progress for fear of having too much of an influence with my online rambling. While this all sounds good in theory, it’s commonly accepted that authors are supposed to have a strong social media presence and a website. Those that go the extra mile are the ones who do regular blog posts. No one except Thomas Pynchon is allowed to be Thomas Pynchon anymore. I’ve forced myself to dabble in blog posting and have found the results to be more of a convincing argument against buying my books than a promising tease of brilliance. “This guy can’t even commit to writing a good blog post. How can the novel be any good?”That’s what the imaginary well-dressed man with wavy hair sipping a cup of black coffee says after reading my posts. I’ll admit—he has a point. Why can’t these things be brilliant little teasers that get retweeted and Google shared and Facebook liked? Is it a matter of effort or a matter of talent? Does a thriller get judged under the same criteria as a 500 word blog post? I’d like to stay out of it if I can. Let the wavy haired Yuppie offspring come to his own conclusion. I respect the authors who can juggle both successfully. There’s a lot of them out there. Rainstorm Press is the dictionary example of it. It’s the way of the future. I can’t hide myself. I don’t want to be the old guy spending 30 minutes trying to find the calculator app on his iPhone. By the way, the calculator app? It’s under Extras because it’s not as important as the Game Center or your Facebook app.

Max Daniels is a twenty-one year old writer and author of The Manipulantwhich is available on Amazon UK and US. He is currently in the process of completing his second novel entitled The Follies of Being.

I think in many respects, we like reading from the villain's perspective. There is something so distinct about hearing how the bad guy thinks. From a young age I loved reading stories that did this. It was exciting to follow a criminal or a killer or just a generic baddie as the main character. I suppose it’s something of an escape. We would never deal with the dark and demonic minds that we read, and it thrills us to see someone who has such a different moral code to ours. There is a level of curiosity as well, we wonder what it would be like to follow a morally repugnant character through the trials of their life. The iconic tales are numerous: A Clockwork Orange, American Psycho, Lolita, Alfie - the list goes on. It’s a natural, albeit morbid obsession that we humans have. We like seeing the abyss of humanity and relish watching as the abyss stares back.

Even so, the question comes to those authors - why create these people? It can't be an escape because they know where the character is going. There is no thrill in following them. Furthermore, it cannot be some odd wish we want fulfilled - writers aren't that interesting. So what is it? In my mind, it is something to do with shocking readers into thinking about important issues. The bad guy draws us in as we follow their dark deeds through the novel. We come to think of them as the worst humanity has to offer. We are ready to be done with them. Then it all changes. By the end something happens. Something small and odd. Something we don’t quite understand until the look is put down and we dwell on what we have just read.

We realise, after our morbid curiosity is sated, that we are faced with someone who has been deceiving us the entire time. We have believed that the person in the story is a generic villain: morally deplorable and easily dealt with by our clear cut ethics. At the end though, we realise that they are much more. They have a human element that has been hiding from us this entire time. Not only does this put into question how we as individuals view people in our day to day lives, but it also forces us to see the bad guy of the story as someone far more fragile than we first suspected. So fragile in fact, that they have had to put up this entire guise of villainy to obscure the weak person underneath. In closing, I think the villain is a fantastic character to focus a story on because they are never simple. They always keep you guessing and thrill you with their thoughts and ideas. They are complex and never just a stock character. Above all the villain is always hiding something - even if that something is their true self.

Amy Durrant is an author and advertising creative from London. Her science fiction novel, ‘Prisms’, was nominated for the London Book award in 2012 and can be found here on Amazon UK and Amazon US

Many great writers have found inspiration on the bustling streets of London. Countless scandals and gritty modern reprisals have been conjured by the southern capital in the minds of those like Zadie Smith. The underbelly of the city laid bare by the masterful writers of Orwell’s time, with his own account straddling the back streets of Paris and London. For me, London is a melting pot of not just people but colours and stories waiting to be grasped. An opportunity which as a writer, presents both intrigue and a great deal of frustration. My first novel featured the odd nod to the cobbles of Covent Garden, however, missed the perfect mundane of the everyday. I take the tube to work morning and night, conform to the same routine of getting on, avoiding eye contact, getting off and hurrying along to the exit with the crowd. It is in this, that the greatest creative opportunity lies. Dozens upon dozens of stories. People moving like light flecks around the city, beneath its streets. Who are we to know if one is an artist, or respected engineer? That leather duffel bag might contain the plans for a great palace. That child could be the first to receive a pioneering medical procedure that changes the face of our future. It was in this, that I set myself a challenge which I would like to share with you and inspire you to take up in your own town or city. A nod to the great writers of our time and the time before that who picked out the character in our everyday. Now when I move about the city, I carry an A5 pocket book and every day for the last month, I’ve been looking around a great deal more than I used to. When I see someone on the tube now, I imagine their story and devote the space of a page to detailing it down. A book full of fantasy and creativity, inspired by the everyday around us. Not only does it enable me to flex my mental muscles a little, it puts magic back into the capital. Yours needn’t be an affair with London but wherever you are, create something from the nothing and you’ll be surprised just how incredible it is.

I've lost count of the amount of times people have asked me why I write 'horror.' It comes up in every interview, and eventually most conversations. I guess it's the obvious question to ask, but I've always found it a difficult one to answer. Firstly, I hate the H word. There are so many dimensions and sub-genres involved, the H word has become kind of a catch-all umbrella term. Asking google to find you a horror book is a bit like going into the finest restaurant in the world and asking for some food. Or calling up your local radio station and asking them to play some music. What do zombies, ghosts, werewolves, vampires, demonic entities, possession, serial killers, monsters, and haunted houses all have in common? That's right, you can find them all in the horror section. But in most cases, the similarities end there. I'm not a big fan of classifying anything, to be honest. It's restrictive and fills the prospective reader's mind full of semi-fixed ideas. I know it makes it easier when you are looking for something in particular. In theory, anyway. But most things in this brave new world we've created just don't belong in tidy little labelled boxes. If I had to choose a tag for my writing, I would probably go for 'dark fiction.' Because it's fiction, and most of it is pretty damn dark. At the same time, though, a lot of my stories involve elements of what one reviewer called 'sardonic humour,' so its not all doom and gloom. I can usually find something to poke fun at. Another reason I don't care for the 'H word' is that the genre is rarely taken very seriously in literary circles, apart from the classics like Dracula and Frankenstein. When was the last time a piece of horror fiction won one of the big awards? Most critics treat it like a snot-nosed little brother who spends all his time locked in his room listening to Slipknot and smoking weed. That isn't entirely fair. Use caution, critics. Because if you ignore him for too long that snot-nosed little brother, frustrated and disaffected, might just scale the walls of your ivory tower and slice your throat while you are asleep in your bed. You have been warned.

Susan Dorsey is the author of the Jane Brooks cozy mystery series. Her latest novel, A Haunted Death, is available at Amazon US and Amazon UK.

The worst piece of writing advice I’ve ever received was from a very enthusiastic author who was speaking on a panel about dialogue. He bragged to the audience that one of his favorite things to do was to put in earbuds, turn off his iPod, and sit in coffee shops. This way, he assured us, he could overhear people’s conversations without them knowing he was listening in. If we all listened to real conversations, we could improve our dialogue. My problem with this bit of advice is that it just does not work. Dialogue isn’t the same as our everyday speech. Our conversations are filled with trivia, niceties, mundane details, and repetition. We speak to each other for a wide variety of reasons. We use our words to convey friendship, comfort, and relieve boredom. Dialogue exists to move your story along. Every word must mean something or your readers will be bored and distracted. Dialogue doesn’t just take place between actions. Dialogue is action. Sure, your characters can stutter, repeat themselves, and even talk about the weather, but they had better have a damn good reason for doing so. I think this is especially true in the cozy murder mystery genre where clues are sprinkled throughout character’s conversations. Readers know when an author has mastered the art of dialogue. The plot moves and the reader happily moves with it. Thankfully, we don’t have to choose our everyday words as carefully as we write our dialogue. We don’t have to stringently edit ourselves when we chat with the cashier at the grocery store or the person standing next to us in line at Starbucks. Choose your written words wisely. Keep writing, keep publishing good work, and maybe the next conversation you hear at the coffee shop will be people talking about how much they like your novel.

Ronald DeStefano is the author of Shoegazer and the short story Play Crack the Sky featured in the Rainstorm Press anthology, Through the Eyes of a Storm. He currently resides in Upstate New York.

I didn’t encounter genre fiction until I was already an avid reader and a budding writer. The books I read were labeled “transgressive” or “postmodern” or that ever elusive category: “literary fiction.” My tastes were forged in the fires of Chuck Palahniuk and Bret Easton Ellis, Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy, Jeffrey Eugenides and Jonathan Franzen. To this day I’ve still never read a horror novel, my experience with science fiction is very limited (i.e. 1984, Brave New World, and the occasional Philip Dick or Ray Bradbury), and, until a few years ago, my relationship with the mystery genre began and ended with The Hardy Boys books from when I was a child. That all changed when I finally sat down and read Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler. There is something magical about it and I’m still not sure what exactly it is. All the noir footholds are there: gangsters, gambling dens, kidnapping, murder, women who are as beautiful as they are dangerous, and a fast-talking private eye getting in over his head. In the months after I finished it, I devoured every other Raymond Chandler novel I could get my hands on, sprinkling in the occasional Dashiell Hammett for good measure, loving every moment I spent with the quick-witted, but down on his luck, Philip Marlowe.

This was also around the time I started working on my novel, Shoegazer. I was full of Chandleresque inspiration and decided that I would follow the format I had read in all of his novels and pump out a nice, tight little mystery. You can probably guess what happened next. Best laid plans and all of that nonsense. The problem was that I was following a formula. I was attempting to distill what it was I loved about those books by mimicking them. It was dishonest. I wasn’t being myself. I wasn’t allowing what was unique about my work to flourish, I was suffocating it with tropes I only incorporated into my novel because I had seen them elsewhere. I was leaving out all the aspects of myself that would make for an interesting story because it didn’t fit into the preconceived notions of what the genre embodies. I also realized was that my love of Raymond Chandler had nothing to do with the aspects that made it a noir classic. I don’t care about the setting of 1940s Los Angeles or the inclusion of organized crime. I don’t care that every character carries a gun or talks like a tough guy. Those things only interest me insofar as they interact with Philip Marlowe. His character is what drew me to those books. He’s not Sherlock Holmes. He’s smart, but by no means a genius. He’ll solve the case, but only after a series of missteps. He can hold his own in a fight, but he’s not Superman and at any given moment, his life could be in danger. More times than not, he doesn’t fit in. He is the quintessential stranger in a strange land. But, most importantly, he’s flawed. Weak. Human.

I had no plot when I began writing Shoegazer. I never once wrote an outline. I wanted to discover every piece of information as I was writing it. The only thing I knew for sure was that my main character, Max Donovan (a name I selected because it sounded obnoxiously like the name of a hero detective in some clichéd crime series), would have his boss murdered and his friend go missing on the same day. Beyond that, I knew nothing. None of the characters that appear, the places they go, or how everything would resolve itself—it was all discovered through the process of writing. And there were days where I thought I had written myself into a corner. Where I thought I had put Max into a situation that impossible to get out of. But I never backed out. I never made edits to make my life easier. If my character encountered a problem but there was an interesting story dynamic behind it, I left it in and found a creative solution to it. After all, I had all the time in the world. This was my first novel. I had no deadline to meet. In Shoegazer, Max Donovan is not a superstar detective or even a licensed private eye. He’s an underachiever, working part time at a bar. His motivation in finding his missing friend is initially driven by selfish reasons which then, as the novel progresses, grow into altruistic ones. I knew I wanted the story to descend into bizarre terrain so I created a fictional town called Pale Saints where I could control every aspect of city life. I followed that naming scheme and every building and street in the novel are named after prominent shoegaze bands. Point is, I placed no limitations on myself. I set no guidelines or barriers. I told the story I wanted to tell. I have a rock band who think they have died and are walking around the afterlife. A girl who treats the emotional spectrum as her own personal bucket list. A man who believes so strongly in reincarnation that he takes time every week to act out all of his past lives. Any interesting tidbit I came up with made its way into the novel, so long as it serviced the story in some way.

Shoegazer certainly has roots in the mystery genre. I used Raymond Chandler as a starting point and then allowed myself to create something personal that hopefully others can connect with. It’s that thought, after all, the concept of sharing an intimate moment with a complete stranger through the power of fiction that compels us to write in the first place.

When I tell people that I am an author, they always ask me who my greatest influences are. I always respond with Tom Clancy and Ian Fleming. When I first submitted to Rainstorm Press the publisher asked me, “Espionage can get played out, what separates your book from all the others?” He asked a very valid question; there are countless stories about spies saving the world just in the nick of time. That led me to think about just why Tom Clancy and Ian Fleming’s novels became so popular, and I think I have gotten to the bottom of it. The characters. James Bond, and Jack Ryan were not only heroes but layered characters that always kept the readers guessing. Coming up with a good plot for espionage thrillers is not that difficult; the protagonist could be chasing down a super spy, uncovering a corrupt government, finding a nuclear bomb before it explodes … The possibilities are endless. Somehow the free world is going to be saved; however, no one is going to care about the free world if they don’t care about the person who saves it. In many different stories the plot is the main focus of the book. I believe that in espionage thrillers the characters must be the focus of the story. That is what is going to make a novel marketable. Fleming’s James Bond and Clancy’s characters like John Clarke and Jack Ryan have sold countless movies and video games, not because people care about the latest crazy ex-soviet general pointing nukes at the UK and the US. It’s because people are infatuated with these characters. The next Bond movie could be about 007 going to the super market, and you know what I’d pay to see it, and thousands of other fans would too. When I explained to the publisher the complex nature of X in my book, I convinced him that my main character had something that people wanted to read about. Slowly Memoir of a Variable is becoming a series with Ten Names arriving on Amazon in the upcoming months. My dream for X is that he will one day join the ranks of James Bond and Jack Ryan, two of the many heroes that have inspired me.